Witch in the White City: A Dark Historical Fantasy/Mystery (Neva Freeman Book 1), Nick Wisseman [best novels for students .TXT] 📗

and somehow she was managing the climb without tripping over her flowing dress. But although festive braids corded her auburn hair, filling it with blue flowers and intricate knots, her eyes betrayed less joyous emotions; she at least must have learned what he’d done at Edgeland ... Had her lover survived? Had she found him? “She doesn’t want to be here.”

Tay nodded.

“Why do you think they’ve come?”

“Because they must.” Lifting one end of her rainstick to the height of her ribs, she let it fall back against her thighs, setting off a storm of tiny rattles. Then she glanced at him. “Was that your question? If you want me to play at reading fates again ...”

“I know—yes or no only.” Naysin uprooted a blade of crabgrass and twisted it to the point of breaking and back. “Do any of them want to be here?”

“Do you?” Tay said softly. Without waiting for a response, she closed her eyes, took a slow breath, and tapped the ground twice. “That means no.”

It was his turn to nod.

“Naysin ...” Tay reached her left hand toward his right before pulling back. “How much longer? I know they’re to arrive at the same time, but ...” She anticipated his answer by rising and brandishing her rainstick, setting it rattling like a slash of hail.

He dropped the crabgrass. “It’s now,” he said unnecessarily as, in eerie unison, the ascenders crested the summit. Then he lifted the collective veil, and the ascenders saw each other for the first time. Eyes flickered back and forth as Quecxl sneered at the burned man, who glared at Amadi, who smiled and beckoned.

But no one acted faster than Isaura, who drew a pistol from beneath her dress and shot Naysin through the stomach as Tay screamed a belated warning.

Head still down, he grunted, twitched ... and laughed while everyone else exploded into motion. Tay took a step toward Isaura before doubling back to Naysin; Isaura lowered her pistol and shrieked, her face a mixture of triumph and grief; Amadi yelled a battle cry and charged the burned man; the burned man brought his blunderbuss to bear on Amadi, squeezed the trigger, and let loose a column of fire; Quecxl sprinted toward Naysin.

But just before flesh and flame came into contact, Naysin whipped his arms around in a circle. Everyone else froze, paralyzed in mid-stride—except for Tay, who’d dropped her rainstick to press her hands against his side.

“Why didn’t you stop her?” Tay’s voice was steady, but her lisp had grown thicker.

“I was watching the burned man.” He paused as the pain set in. “It wasn’t in the vision.”

Blood oozed between Tay’s fingers, and she pressed harder. “Can you heal it?”

Naysin finally raised his head, revealing a swirling brand pulsing around his left eye. With each beat his veins shone darker, as if his skin were being stretched thin over a sable spider web. “No. I’d just worsen it.” A vortex of wind encircled the pyramid while he contemplated the stasis he’d created. “And balancing this is ... taking a lot out of me. It hurts more than the bullet.” He laughed again, this time more with sorrow than surprise, and blood trickled up from his mouth, carried aloft by the increasingly violent air.

“Then let me reduce the burden.”

“What?”

“Let me reduce the burden!” Tay repeated, shouting to make herself heard above the wind. She pulled Naysin’s hands over his wound and picked up her rainstick. “Starting with her!” She jabbed the clattering weapon toward Isaura, whose brilliant tresses were snapping about her head and trailing blue petals.

Naysin didn’t raise his voice. “No, Tay.”

She turned her unsettling eyes back on him.

“That wasn’t in your vision either.”

Tay stared at him a moment longer before jamming her rainstick in the ground and sprinting to her pack, where she began shredding her spare tunic into bandages, cursing as the wind tried to snatch each new strip away. “Your cougar-men,” she asked when she returned, outwardly calm again. “Could they heal you?”

His arteries glittered white now, like fracture lines in shattered ice. “Tay ... they’re not who you think.”

She murmured something unintelligible.

“Believe what you want, but in the last three seasons, the only thing they’ve done—aside from trying to kill me—was taunt me with the knowledge that this pyramid was once called Saint’s Summit.” He winced as she wound the strips of tunic tight around his side. “Because we all know I’m anything but a holy man. They won’t help.”

Tay finished tying the bandage and looked up at him, challenging his tattooed gaze with her milky one. “Maybe they’re not who you think they are.”

Taken aback by the flecks of fear in her expression and the intensifying agony in his stomach, Naysin paused to reflect ... and came to a realization. “Maybe,” he pretended to concede, “but right now, what matters is who they are.” He motioned with his head toward the frozen ascenders, then grimaced. “Spirits and lakes,” he mumbled before struggling on. “They came—we asked them to come—because this was meant to happen. And if I can figure out why ...”

Tay faked a smile. “Meant to happen?” she teased valiantly. “Who’s a skeptic now? Repentant on your death bed? ... Naysin? What is it? ... Naysin!”

It took several moments for his eyes to refocus and register her anxious face. “I’m not sure how—maybe it’s the beacon—but I can see them now, Tay. Truly see them: how they got here, where they’ve been, what they’ve done ... It’s snarled, though. I have to ... untangle us. And it hurts. Spirits and lakes, it hurts ... But I can know them, Tay. I can really know them ... I think that’s the key to helping our people ... All the original people.”

“No. You’re too weak ... Naysin? ... NAYSIN!” She squeezed his hand to call him back.

But he was already gone, bent on unraveling the knots of experience uniting six people atop the wind-cloaked pyramid. The first threads were his, and with his discipline flayed by pain, there